The present disclosure relates generally to the field of content management, and more particularly to managing content item syndication by maintaining referential integrity between isolated systems.
Content management systems often separate development, authoring, staging and production environments. With this separation comes the requirement to support transmitting artifacts between these environments (hereinafter “syndicate”) that can introduce data management issues, such as unknown or unresolvable references. CMS can control the referential integrity between content items. For example, if content item A references content item B then content item B can not be deleted until the reference within content item A is removed or re-routed to a different content item, which ensures that on the final production site the link that appears with content item A is operational and not generating a, for example, a “404 Not Found” error notice.
At times, race conditions can occur wherein a down stream system attempts to apply a syndicated item that refers to a content item that does not yet exist on the system, which can frustrate the ability to ensure referential integrity of syndicate content items between systems. Current solutions include cataloging the original reference value along with the property within the content item that held it in a collection of references to fix. Another approach involves committing all changes that being syndicated into a repository in a single transaction.